


Iridescent

by CatKing_Catkin



Category: Journey into Mystery, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Thor (Comics), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Bittersweet, Blood, Blood Magic, Character Death Fix, Character Development, Character Study, Companionable Snark, Despair, Dialogue Light, F/M, Female Protagonist, Fix-It, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Headcanon, Introspection, Kissing, Loki Feels, Love, POV Female Character, Post-Canon Fix-It, Romance, Snark, Teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 16:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2435885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatKing_Catkin/pseuds/CatKing_Catkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 645. Alone in a place where even time hasn't fully gotten its act together, Leah wanders. The girl who will one day rule Hel reflects on what was, what will be, and how she came to be here. In the end, she comes to a decision, and speaks it to the open air:</p><p>"I miss that idiot. I think I shall bring him back."</p><p>Cast back into the distant past as one of Loki's last acts in existence, Leah tries to find the words to tell a story, and tell it well. Because a life as bad fiction is a fate worse than death, and she wouldn't wish that on her worst enemy. Though she'll hate Loki as long as there's a heart in her chest, he certainly isn't that. After all, hate and love are not so different. She learned that from him, and might learn a little more about herself in the bargain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iridescent

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what it is about the Marvel comics that bring out the experimental avant garde in me. I'm not always pleased with the results, but I've gotta say, the process is fun. 
> 
> That said, this is a story that's been fermenting inside me since...well, since I read 645. I wanted, somehow, to make that one lie true. I wanted to write a story of Leah writing Loki back into existence. I wanted that scene of them laying together in the grass and the sun, with everything being okay. 
> 
> I'm no Loki when it comes to words...but all told, I'm glad I finally strung these words together. It feels good to have it out and said.

The distant past was a very boring place.

It was a world before mortals, and therefore a world before anything interesting associated with mortals – least of all death. Ordinarily, Leah might have welcomed the peace and quiet. Mortals were messy, disorganized, idiotic creatures. Gods still existed, of course, immortals fighting their immortal wars, but they had not learned how to die yet and so did not concern her. They, in turn, gave her as much notice as she might give an ant scuttling along a mile away, and had not grown quite so sloppy and thoughtless as to ruin the natural beauty of the world she’d found herself on.

It was, to say the least, far nicer than a dirty great hole in the ground.

She had a lot of time to herself, and a lot of time to think. That meant, however, that there was nothing to distract her thoughts from going to unfortunate and unwanted places. All the natural beauty around her could not dull the ruin that had been made of a heart she hadn’t even had before him.

Damn him.

As long as there was a heart in her chest, she would hate him.

But that resolution didn’t exactly do her much good if he wasn’t around to be hated. Without Loki _here_ to remind her how idiotic, reckless, careless, thoughtless, selfish, and manipulative he was, she caught herself thinking instead of how clever he was, how he strove through manipulation rather than idiot heroics to work his will and somehow it all came out _better_. How he’d been so _bright_ and _alive_. That shouldn’t have moved her, of course, not she who would one day rule over Hel and create herself. The lure of the unfamiliar and the unattainable, however, was just too great. They’d both understood that.

More than anything, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about how one of the dumbest things he’d ever done had been all for her. She couldn’t help regretting his brother’s damnably poor timing.

She missed milkshakes. She missed the Internet and all its insanity. She even missed that little, slobbering beast Loki had insisted on keeping close, and rather less grudgingly missed the Son of Satan in all his darkness and bad temper.

She was _alive_ and everything she’d come to associate with life had been taken away from her. As things that were barely even known as “days” passed by, no matter how hard Leah thought, no matter how hard she tried to be brutally rational with herself as the Queen of Hel should be, she couldn’t understand _why_.

More to the point, she found that she wasn’t willing to wait countless millennia until she went around it all again as Hela to find out. Loki had infected her with his blind, burning humanity, and with it came _impatience_.

Why should he get away without living with the consequences of that?

And so it was that, one night in the distant past before the dawn of mortality and death, that Leah of Nowhere, who would one day be Hela of Hel, stared up at the unreachable stars overhead and made her decision.

“I miss that idiot. I think I shall bring him back.”

It was easier said than done, of course…except, in some ways, it was harder done than said. To admit that she missed Loki, even to herself, that she wanted him around, that took a lot. Especially after he had sent her away without so much as a backward glance. The distant past had left Leah a good deal of time to think, however, and she had eventually come to the conclusion that something hadn’t added up about all of that. To have nearly sacrificed everything just to make her anew again, only to turn away scant hours later…it didn’t make sense. Even for a god. Even for a _boy_.

She didn’t know what, exactly, had happened, of course. She knew that something must have gone wrong, because of Damien’s ravings about the Fear Crown and Loki’s strange behavior so shortly afterwards. She knew that he had probably resolved to do something terribly, dreadfully _noble_ to fix it.

Yet what better way to satisfy her curiosity fully than by asking him herself? He was probably dead by now or worse, back in the time he’d sent her away from, but why should that stop _her?_

So Leah, who would one day become Hela but for now was only herself, set out to work her will. She had helped do this once, and everything was easier to do again after it had already been done once. An entirely new set of challenges faced her this time, however. Though she had plenty of blood to spare for ink, she had no pen or quill to dip into it and no parchment on which to write this new story.

There were plenty of birds here, brightly colored and beautiful creatures. They lived in the trees and skies, and would die out and cease to be long before any mortal ever knew of their existence. They were peaceful because there was nothing yet for them to fear – those immortals that existed gave them no more acknowledgement than they gave her. She could have wandered up to any one of them and had her pick of suitably sized feathers.

She picked many, at first, plucking out tail feathers or wing pinions with the stupid birds offering barely a squawk because they had no possible way to comprehend the importance of her task. For a very long time without fail, Leah would only turn the feathers over and over in her hands before letting them fall to the ground with a noise of disgust. None of them were suitable. None of them could withstand the sort of magic she would need to wield. They would burn to ashes in her hands before she had written the first word. So she left them like a trail of breadcrumbs behind her in her daily wanderings.

For an even longer time, she despaired. After all, she was setting out to write the first story that would ever be. Immortals had no business writing stories, after all, when they _were_ stories themselves. She was making her way blindly through territory that didn’t even fully exist yet. More importantly, she didn’t know what possibility scared her more – that it might not work at all, or that it might work _improperly_.

Better to die as good fiction than live as bad, after all. Even Leah would not have inflicted that fate on her worst enemy. Loki was that and so much more.

Leah despaired of ever finding the proper tool, until one day in her wanderings she discovered that magpies were older than most mortals believed. Unlike so many of its other winged brethren, it took flight when she approached it, and Leah was forced to give chase. Chase she did, skirts flying around her ankles, hair streaming behind her, breath rasping in her chest. She was sure that she must look very undignified, but it wasn’t as though that mattered. It wasn’t as though anyone was there to see, no matter how much the wind in her ears sounded like his laughter.

The racing of her heart was clearly making her think silly, irrational thoughts, and of course the magpie flew faster than she could run. When it touched down again, she could feel its beady bright gaze on her, knew that the bird was silently laughing at her, and resolved not to be defeated. Now it was a matter of pride. Leah would not be proven less intelligent than a bird – especially _this_ bird.

So she built a trap. It was a neat, quick, clean thing, more than a bird like this deserved. Leah was dimly aware as she made it that she might be projecting her feelings somewhat, but there was no one around to confirm her suspicions so she decided to go ahead with the plan. She built a trap, baited it, and left it in a hidden place within the hollow of a tree where only a fleeing magpie might fit, and she chased it right into it. It’s brief, quickly cut off squawk echoed forlornly in the clear air.

It might have been the very first death this world had ever seen. For that, if nothing else, Leah said a few words over its still form as she plucked out its feathers, one at a time. As she did, she found that she couldn’t help but murmur. “One for sorrow, two for joy…”

She knew, as she held one of its tail feathers delicately poised between thumb and forefinger, that this was right. It was a small feather, its tip when she’d cut it down barely bigger than a blink. That was what was needed, however – a fine and delicate tip to write fine, delicate words. She could see it now, see the skittering and spidery font in blood red ink that would write the story she needed.

Leah of Nowhere, who would one day become Hela of Hel but for now was only herself, was satisfied. She stuck the feathers in her hair and moved on to the next step. After all, each story needed to be written on something. Ink was how words were chained to paper, but though she had ink she had no paper. Words were ideas, cast down from the platonic firmament to the earthly hell, but as long as the chains were not affixed to something real they would never stay cast down. They would flutter and fall through her fingers, just as he had.

Yet no matter how far they fell, words and what were made of them were eternal.

However, what could possibly be eternal enough to hold them? She was making Loki anew in the form of a new story. Of course she wanted the tale to be penned on something that would last. Loki had written her story on the tomes of Dark Asgard, a place that was unreachable now and so forever untouched by time. That was no help to her, then, and she had precious few options that were as good. The very nature of this place made it ephemeral and passing, would have made it so even to someone other than she who faced eternity. It quiet, pristine stillness would not last much longer.

The wind would obscure any marks made in the dirt or sand. Trees with a story etched into their bark would eventually wither, rot, and die, and perhaps the story would rot with it. Even the rocks themselves would one day erode to sand.

For many days and many nights, for days and nights were a thing that existed now, Leah pondered the problem before her. Once again, she despaired of an answer. At her lowest point, she despaired even of the possibility of this working at all. That there could ever be anything as eternal as she was destined to be.

In that moment, of course, Leah had her answer.

She just wouldn’t have very much space to work with. She would have to choose her words very carefully. By the time she reached that realization, of course, she had time to work with. The moon was full and fat overhead, but she resolved that she would wait for it to be new. That was a time of new beginnings. That was a time for other things to be born again. He could come back when the moon did.

Leah told herself, as she sat in the grass and gazed up at the moon, that she was merely taking time to get her thoughts properly in order. Not all problems could be solved by running into them slapdash and hoping for a miracle, especially when you were all alone. As days stretched on, however, each one falling into line now, she could not entirely hide the truth from herself.

She was stalling because she was afraid. All the work and worry she’d put into getting this far, however, were stronger than her fear. So Leah took that month to get her thoughts in order and her heart in line and the words in mind. She made half a dozen new quills for herself, in part just in case but mostly because she’d found the process to be very soothing so far.

That month passed much the same as all the days and months and years and maybe even centuries before it had, since she was cast back here. The only difference was now that the world was coming together enough that “months” seemed to matter. Seasons existed. Weather patterns were once again disgustingly predictable. It would perhaps only be a matter of very short time until humanity re-emerged to muck everything up again.

She would need to have everything in order by then, and it was not a task Leah wanted to take on alone. If humanity could not find order in life, she still meant to see that they found it in death. As she had been made, so she would make, starting with the one she meant to stay by her side this time.

Leah knew that the ruler of the dead must consider cold eternity over red passion, and so the ruler of the dead must _be_ eternal. As such, she could think of no more fitting canvas on which to rewrite the story of Loki. So under the stars and hidden from the moon, she did just that. She rolled up her sleeves, sliced her wrist open with a sharp rock, and dipped her quill into her chosen ink as it welled forth. After that, all preparations made, she began to etch his story onto her own skin, word by word, line by line. When she filled her arm, Leah wrote on her other arm, then her feet and legs, over her stomach and shoulders until she was forced to write blindly along her throat and around her eyes.

_His name was Loki, first of Jotunheim and then of Asgard and at last of Asgardia…_

_Leah wrote of the trickster godling, once called the God of Evil, who escaped the fire and made himself anew. Who stood beside her, hand always outstretched no matter how she clawed at it. In the end, he’d saved something no one cared about. She wasn’t even truly the Leah he’d lost, yet he’d been willing to trade all of reality just for her forgiveness._

_Leah knew that she would one day be respected, feared, revered, needed…but she couldn’t remember Loki and think that she would ever be_ loved _again._

_She wrote of the boy who saved the world and doomed himself. As the words came thick and fast to her mind and to her fingers, her writing grew to a frenzied haste as she tried to express the inexpressible, what she had never been meant to feel and think and know but could not deny that she now was._

_It was a lie to think that he could ever be alive, ever be here beside her again. Leah was not meant to lie. Death was the one finite truth on any world._

_Yet she told her lie to the best of her ability. Because in the end the lies you choose to tell define you. The lies you cling to because there are some truths even the girl who would rule Hel found too horrible to contemplate._

_She prayed it was sufficient. Because she couldn’t bear to carry on in a world where it wasn’t true. He’d left her broken and better but one thing she would not let him leave her was_ alone _._

In the end, it was a story that was almost too much for her to tell. Leah slumped to her knees, woozy from blood loss. She was forced to stem the flow with the hem of her dress before she closed it with a thought. She acted with no fear of smudging the bloody letters scrawled on her skin. Even when they inevitably faded, enough traces would remain to keep power to the magic. In fact, the cold and logical part of her was already contemplating a bath.

For a long time, however, she could only kneel in the grass, breathing hard, feeling her heart race and her lungs expand and everything damnably alive about her that was suddenly so impossible to ignore – including hope. It was a very long time before she could act on that hope, to lift her head and look around the grassy glade where she’d worked her will.

Hope was a damnably mortal invention. Gods had nothing to hope for, because they knew everything they wanted would come to them in time. Beasts did not have enough of a knowledge of past or future to reach beyond the present with hope. The dead had already received all that they were due. Only mortals had the capacity to strive for what was out of their reach without the certainty that it would be theirs’.

Despair was a mortal invention as well, and yet Leah felt it like chains around her heart when she lifted her head and saw that she was still alone. It was still a great effort of will, but Leah dragged herself up from the ground and turned in a slow circle to survey the world around her. There was no one – not even any of the beasts she had long ago become accustomed to ignoring. Certainly no bright-eyed, stupid, and impossibly alive Loki. All was quiet, still, and dead in that dark glade under the new moon.

“Loki?” Leah called out anyway, and she did not sound like the future ruler of Hel. Even on that one word, her voice quivered and broke with exhaustion and weakness. Leah took a deep breath, and tried to call out with all the gravitas of a ruler. “Loki, this is _not funny_. Step out here _right this instant_.”

This time, a soft rustling in the trees surrounding her greeted her call. Leah’s breath caught in her chest, and she tensed in anticipation…but, after a long moment where it felt as though even the universe itself was holding its breath, all that revealed itself was a magpie, hopping into view along a tree branch.

It stared at her with bright, beady eyes and offered a croak, before bowing its head to preen its glossy black feathers.

Leah’s hands were shaking as she reached for the rock still wet with her blood. Her scream of rage and loss as she let it fly were enough to startle the magpie from its perch, safely out of reach and away. For a mad moment, Leah wanted to chase after it, as she had at the start. Rationally, of course, she knew that she would never catch it, but Leah was not in the mood to be rational right now. She wanted to hold that _wretched_ bird in her hands and crush the life from it herself.

She did not do so, in part because her legs felt like they’d been weighed down with shackles of stone and in part because Leah was still rather ruthlessly logical by nature, even when a part of her wished she wasn’t. Tearing that skulking, wicked thing to pieces wouldn’t do anything to undo her failure and loss. Its only true crime was being witness to her grief.

Leah did not cry, not even briefly, though she knew to do so would have been appropriate. She wasn’t sure if she just couldn’t, or if after all that anticipation and debate and striving she’d just found herself numb. Either way, by the time the sun was visibly rising over the horizon, she had gotten to her feet and stalked off to a nearby stream to bathe, determined to think no more about it.

She’d taken up bathing a lot lately, actually. After her memories of so long living in a dirty great hole in the ground, and her reality as Surtur’s servant, Leah had learned not to take clean water for granted. Though there were plenty of dirty great holes in the ground that were free for the occupying, provided you were willing to chase out the animals, Leah slept outside for the exact same reasons. It had left her dress something of a mess, but it wasn’t as though there was anyone else around to care.

As she made the long, familiar walk to her usual stream, Leah knew that she was just trying to stitch her thoughts back into their proper place. It wasn’t working – they kept fraying apart once more, aided by the smell of blood in her nose that represented her failure. She would wash it all away and then make her final descent down to Hel.

The world was coming alive around her, the sun rising and animals awakening. Through the leaves of the trees, she saw the hint of a storm on the horizon that might have been weather or it might have been gods. Leah turned her gaze to the ground instead, and walked on. She lifted the hem of her dress to keep it out of the mud, for all the good it would do.

With her head bowed and her thoughts troubled, she almost missed what was waiting for her at the stream. If the sound of a magpie’s call hadn’t prompted Leah to raise her head up, a fresh surge of rage blooming in her heart, she knew she would have missed her chance entirely. She didn’t, however, and when Leah lifted her head she did not see a magpie. Instead, she saw a boy, lying half-in and half-out of the river as though he’d been washed up there with the rest of the debris. He was dressed in green and black like his hair and eyes, except for a circlet of gold upon his brow that was marked with an emblem of horns. He might have been asleep, he might have been unconscious, but he clearly _was not dead_ and that was what mattered.

That should have meant he wasn’t _hers’_ , and yet she could think of no one who more closely belonged to her. Just as she, in a way, belonged to him. After all, he had created her from his memories of her. She, in turn, had created him from her memories of him. Theirs’ was a circular path of magic and stories and words. Theirs’ was a journey of past to future and back again, creating and created, but that was all right. What had no beginning or end could not again be ended. They were intertwined together, and so they were _strong_. She would make sure from now on that no one could use and discard them like this ever again.

One day, they would dance together on the blackened corpses of any who dared to do them wrong again.

Leah stood there on the bank of the stream for an eternity condensed down into a second. She could feel the sun beating down from overhead and the taste of thunder on her tongue and blood drying on her skin in the shape of words. She watched his thin chest rise and fall with breath as he lay in the mud at her feet.

Then, with some ceremony, she stepped over, wound up, and kicked him squarely in the shoulder. “Loki, _wake up_.”

He let out a sleepy mumble, turning over where he lay and batting at her absently with one hand. “Leah, go ‘way…”

“No.” She kicked him again, this time between the shoulder blades. “You are late enough, and I will not have it.”

This time, even after kicking him, she continued nudging him pointedly with the toes of her shoes until Loki let out a pointed whine and forced himself into a sitting position on the second attempt. He shook his head – his circlet was lopsided and so some of his hair was falling into his face – before opening one eye to stare up at her.

“Meanie,” he said, and even as he sat in her shadow she could see a smile playing at the corner of his lips.

“Idiot,” she said sternly, biting her cheek to keep from smiling. “Get up. You have slept long enough.”

He yawned and stretched, before getting to his feet and making a token effort to brush himself down. “It feels as though I’ve slept forever. What on Earth did I miss?”

“Everything.” She reached out and rested a hand against his cheek. He stiffened slightly in confusion and surprise, staring up at her with wide eyes. He did not flinch away, however, and his faint smile only brightened still further when she murmured, “Never mind. You have all the time in the world to catch up.”

More importantly, they had all the time in the world to finish what the Thunderer and his poor timing had interrupted.

Being Loki, however, he eventually took advantage of the quiet moment of lips and bodies to grab her around the waist and toss her bodily into the stream. Leah of Nowhere, who would one day be Hela of Hel, lost her balance and went falling backwards with a shriek of surprise and a splash of clear, cold water into the stream. She rose, sputtering, already feeling the words running from her arms and hands and legs and throat and face, and hastily wiped at her eyes with her sleeves to chase both water and blood from her vision.

For a long moment, she wondered as her vision cleared if he would be gone. She wondered if she might have ruined the spell somehow, or maybe been hallucinating him from the start.

Then the sound of his laughter rang through the air, mischievous and happy. When Leah finally finished blinking her vision clear once more, it was to see him still standing there on the bank of the stream, doubled over with laughter.

“Well, Leah, I am so terribly sorry, but if you’re going to hand me a chance like that, what can I do but take it? I am only Loki, after all!”

It wasn’t rage that took hold of her heart at the sight. It was just good, old fashioned irritation. Maybe even a little bit of hatred, because as long as there was a heart in her chest she would hate him. One thing he had taught her from the start, however, and one thing that they would both have ample opportunity to learn anew, however, was that hate and love were not so different at all.

“You are only Loki and so I will give you precisely what Loki deserves!” Leah cried, surging to her feet. She charged through the water back to dry land, as fast as her feet and her sodden dress would let her go. With a sound halfway between a yelp and a laugh, Loki turned away from her and fled madly back into the trees. Leah chased after him. She ran with her skirts flying around her ankles, hair streaming behind her, breath rasping in her chest. She was sure that she must look very undignified, but it wasn’t as though that mattered. There was only one person there to see – the only one who mattered.

She didn’t have to build a trap, this time. She only had to chase, and in the end, he let himself be caught. Under the trees, their leaves burnished red and gold by one of the first autumns, he stumbled to a stop and turned back to face her. As she reached out to him, he reached back to her.

They met – in fact, Leah was still running so hard that she collided forcibly with him, and they both collapsed in a heap to the grass. The grass was soft and cool with morning dew and the leaves played soft shadows over their faces. Leah knew that they should get up. She knew that they both had things they needed to do, a world they needed to help set on its path.

Instead, Leah folded her arms behind her head and settled back with a sigh. By her side, head by her feet and toes by her head, Loki did the same. All of that could wait just a little longer.

They had time.

_And in the distant past…the end._

 


End file.
